Like more than a few famous physicians, Paul Marks did not seem destined for a career in medicine. His father was the owner of a clothing store deep in eastern Pennsylvania’s coal-mining region. His mother’s father owned the other clothing store in town. When Marks was 4 1/2 years old, his mother died in an accident at her parents’ store and, for the next five years, his father withdrew from his life.
Raised among aunts and uncles and grandparents in Brooklyn, Marks’s luck turned there in his junior year at Samuel J. Tilden High School when, in 1943, he met a teacher whose physician son had just been killed in Guadalcanal. “He sort of adopted me,” Marks recalled decades later, “and was determined to get me to go to medical school.” There wasn’t much encouragement at home — “My grandparents weren’t exactly interested, and my father wasn’t around at that time” — but Marks excelled at Tilden and then at Columbia University and Columbia’s medical school, where he later taught and was dean and vice president in the 1970s.
In 1980, Marks was a candidate to be Columbia’s next president, but the job went, instead, to Columbia’s provost. Then fate intervened. Across town, Laurance Rockefeller, chairman of the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was looking for someone to succeed its retiring president, Lewis Thomas, the genteel cell biologist best known for his essays in the New England Journal of Medicine collected in The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974), and other bestsellers.
Then, as now, the century-old Sloan Kettering was one of the world’s preeminent centers for cancer research and treatment. But Rockefeller was worried that it had largely become a destination for surgery and, after a fraud scandal in the midst of a new national “war on cancer,” had lost its edge in research: “We [need] somebody to come in and pull this place together.”
That somebody was Marks. In his three decades at Columbia, he had combined a rigorous practice with distinguished research and sharpened his fundraising skills with a flair for management and talent-spotting. Better yet, he was a leading molecular biologist at the moment when a burgeoning knowledge of genetics and DNA, along with inquiries into the molecular action of cells in relation to disease, was being applied to cancer. Marks was determined to renew and refresh Sloan Kettering’s reputation for treatment with distinction in research.
In his case, this required not only an awareness of the dynamic nature of science and medical practice but a willingness to adapt and reform cancer treatment in response to the challenge of expanding knowledge. Or, put another way, in the words of a 1987 New York Times Magazine profile, Marks was willing to “shake up” Sloan Kettering in order to maintain, and in his mind justify, its reputation.
This meant that physicians and surgeons were expected to excel in research as well as clinical practice. Marks combined Sloan Kettering’s research and hospital divisions, independent since their separate founding in the 19th century, and instituted rigorous peer-reviewed standards for tenure, which led, inevitably, to conflict and turbulence. Marks could be ruthless in his judgment of older hands and ambitious in his recruitment of new blood. In his first decade as president, there were incipient staff revolts, angry departures, and adverse publicity. That same Times profile revealed that “there are researchers who call Marks ‘Caligula,’ ‘Attila the Hun,’ or simply ‘the monster.'”
And yet, by the time he stepped down in 1999, Marks had not just accomplished what Sloan Kettering asked him to do but had transformed its character and the nature of cancer research and treatment, including pain management, in America. When he died in New York last month at 93, Sloan Kettering remembered that Marks had “establish[ed] the highest standards for research and patient care.” Or, as his wife once told the Times, “He really doesn’t understand why people don’t work 97 hours a day, and why they don’t care as much as he cares.”
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
